Cambridge Business Association
Leadership Insights for Wizards and Witches
Book

Leadership Insights for Wizards and Witches

Exploring Effective Leadership Practices Through Popular Culture

Aditya Simha
Emerald Publishing Limited, 2022
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Overview
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Professor Aditya Simha found that drawing leadership lessons from pop culture is an effective teaching technique. A lifelong reader of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Simha turned to them for examples of different types of leaders.Discussing personality tests and varied leadership modes, he defines leadership types such as ethical, servant and transactional, and matches each one with a Hogwarts counterpart. Dumbledore, Harry and even Voldemort appear in Simha’s categorizations. He can be pedantic – useful only if you need research references on leadership types – but he also provides fun as he conjures up the wizarding world’s denizens as boardroom types and makes it clear that it’s still not good to be a muggle.

Summary

View leadership through a cultural context.

Learning how to lead and to understand leadership is easier for business students if their lessons draw context from popular culture. Author and professor Aditya Simha, who says he’s read J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series “50 or 60” times, finds that the wizarding world offers a magical way to teach his students about leadership. For example, the headmaster of the Hogwarts school, Albus Dumbledore, exemplifies emotional intelligence, while the evil Lord Voldemort demonstrates the misuse of coercive power.

Effective leaders know their personality type, strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, many leadership personality assessments that developed over time are meaningless. For example, the “blood-group” theory, which some Asian firms still use unofficially, echoes the wizarding world’s distinction between the “pure-blood” descendants of wizards and witches versus the “mudbloods” of mixed magical and muggle parentage. Harry opposes this prejudiced view, but it’s popular with Draco Malfoy and his father. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which brings to mind the phony...

About the Author

As an associate professor of management at the University of Wisconsin, Aditya Simha concentrates on business ethics, healthcare ethics and organizational behavior.  

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